On December 19th 2017, GPIF “Government Pension Investment Fund” in Japan announced its first real estate investment mandate through a fund of funds real estate mandate-domestic core strategy, and it is expected for them to announce for overseas real estate in 2018.

Including GPIF, the four big Japanese public pensions- with total AUM nearly 1.7 trillion USD, as well as large groups of Japanese financial institutions are crystallizing their overseas investments now. Total asset sizes of these groups exceed 10 trillion USD. Not only are financial institutions, but Japanese real estate companies are proceeding to make global investments.

Asterisk estimates the investments to overseas real estate made by Japanese investors in 2017 to exceed 10 billion USD (including capital commitment to funds), and it will accelerate in 2018.

Despite only about 30% of major insurance companies starting their global real estate investments at the end of 2017, we expect 70-80% of Japanese insurance companies may have allocated to global real estate in 2018. The same can be said of other groups of Japanese investors.

In 2018, we expect percentage of investment to Europe and Australia from Japanese investors to increase. This will be different from in 2017 when most Japanese investors chose US as its first overseas investment.

In the level of fund investment, we expect over 10 billion USD could be deployed to global real estate, and same amount of direct real estate investment could be done by Japanese real estate companies, if there are investable and reasonable opportunities.

In our following newsletters we analyze how Japanese investors are thinking about the market cycles of global real estate, and what is their investment rationale in this situation.

Asterisk is a private fund placement agency for global alternative in Japan. Through our unique and extensive network of Japanese investors, we support global fund managers in accessing Japanese and Asian institutional investors (pensions, financial institutions, real estate developers, other business companies, etc.).

We provide access and strategies for overseas fund managers to bridge the gap between them and Japanese investors.